What is an appropriate EV?

[T3]

I've been trying to mod Perpetual Melo on another site, but the site's admin and I disagreed on whether it is balanced or not - he thought the setup was very townsided. When I actually went ahead and calculated town's EV I got 24%, which would make it very scumsided. If I understand correctly, a good EV is around 35%. Is this correct, and is Perpetual Melo actually balanced?

[Aisa]

I'm going to attempt an answer for my own amusement as much as anything. As you might know I don't have any particular experience of setup design, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, and rebuttals are very welcome.

I do believe that towns have >rand accuracy, so my intuition is that a balanced game will probably have <50% EV. 35% EV sounds I guess plausible enough that I can believe games like that can be balanced. I do think it also depends on the individual setup.

My guess is that, if anything, Perpetual Melo is a bit scumsided? If we're going off EV, 24% sounds really low.

Ignoring EV, what jumps out to me is that town cannot eliminate scum unless all townies agree on a wagon or scum bus. I think scum should be able to use this to their advantage and should find it fairly easy to secure mis-eliminations, especially earlier on in the game when town is still getting its act together. It might come at the expense of slightly worse associatives later on, but my intuition is this should still work out in favour of scum a majority of the time.

Put another way, I can very easily envision runs of the setup where town gets absolutely steamrolled despite putting in an honest effort. I have a harder time imagining runs where scum gets steamrolled by town.

(Here's the setup from a past run for reference)
viewtopic.php?p=12701829#p12701829

Twelve player open theme setup
Five Mafia vs. seven Town
If the town successfully eliminates a Mafia player on a particular day, then the Mafia team kills a Town player that night. However, if the town eliminates incorrectly, then the Mafia team has to sacrifice one of their own the following night.
Town wins if they eliminate three mafia goons before they mis-eliminate three times.
Mafia wins if they can coordinate a mis-eliminate three times before three of their members are eliminated.
Essentially it is a match for three out of five.

Setup Specific Highlight from the rules below: If there's no majority at deadline, there's no elimination. If this happens ONCE, the Mafia will be required to No-Kill on the following night. If this happens AGAIN, then the Mafia will get to make a Kill the following night.

[Skygazer]

It's worth noting that there are things that can make a game much more unbalanced than the EV would imply. Nightless, for example, is pretty brutal on scum when running setups with EVs that look "balanced." And White Flag has a ~47% EV, which seems townsided at first glance, but town have only won 27.3% of White Flag games (according to the wiki's small sample size which might be out of date).

[Psyche]

Are there any good EV simulators out there? Would be a fun project.

[fferyllt]

I feel like the design can be swingy and is challenging to play. Scum have a lot of control over the elim due to numbers, but they have to give up potential associatives every night after they win the day's elimination. Whether the associatives are helpful to town is a matter of skill for both town and scum.

I'll leave EV calculations to others. Perpetual MELO has been run 4 times at MS. Town have won twice and scum have won twice.

I'll probably run the game again this year. The last table to play it had some suggestions about updating some things to make the game fit current site meta better. I'll probably include some of those changes.

I'd like to see it become an open design that can be run in the Open Queue instead of the Mini Theme queue, but the EV would probably have to be better understood for that to happen.